Wyche-Dobson-McCoy House
(ca. 1910)
The one-time First Ward Wyche-Dobson-McCoy House represents Charlotte’s historical experiences with both civil rights and urban renewal.
801 E 8th St, Charlotte, NC 28202
Despite its current location on East 8th Street, the Wyche-Dobson-McCoy House is in fact a rare surviving dwelling from the twentieth-century Black First Ward neighborhood destroyed by a 1970s urban renewal project. As such, the house reflects several trends in the evolution of First Ward, including the shifting racial make-up of residential blocks in the early twentieth century, the transition of the area into a vibrant Black neighborhood by mid-century, the redlining and rezoning practices that led to real estate disinvestment, the 1960s and 1970s urban renewal projects that led to massive demolition, and the neighborhood advocacy that resulted in early historic preservation efforts.
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The house was originally constructed in 1910 at 610 East 9th Street. At that time, all residents of that block were white. When Kellene Lewis Wyche (1903-1943) purchased the house in 1934, it appears she was the first Black homeowner on that block. Her husband, Dr. Rudolph M. Wyche (1900-1973), was not included on the deed. The couple had married in 1930 in Kellene’s hometown of Washington, D.C., where Rudolph (a Johnson C. Smith alumnus) attended medical school at Howard University. Upon relocating to Charlotte in the early 1930s, they lived at 705 East 9th Street, a block of all Black residents located one block away from the home they purchased in 1934. By 1936, the 600 block of East 9th Street was racially mixed and remained so through the 1940s.
Kellene Wyche was a schoolteacher and a ballet dancer. She had a dance studio in an outbuilding located in the home’s backyard. Dr. Rudolph Wyche was a second-generation physician. His father Dr. Allen A. Wyche (1865-1914) practiced in Second Ward from the 1890s. North Carolina’s Jim Crow segregation laws prevented both Dr. Rudolph Wyche and his father from joining the state’s all-white medical professional association. When he became president of the all-Black Old North State Medical Society, Dr. Rudolph Wyche led efforts to integrate the all-white North Carolina Medical Society. In 1951, he was also one of the Black Charlotteans to launch a six-year legal battle to integrate Charlotte’s all-white Bonnie Brae municipal golf course. In addition to his medical practice, Dr. Wyche acted as the university physician for Johnson C. Smith University from 1952 until 1968. Following Kellene’s untimely death in 1943, Dr. Wyche married Carolyne Welborne Wyche (1924-2010), a Salisbury native and a nurse trained at Charlotte’s Good Samaritan Hospital. The couple continued to live in the 610 East 9th Street house until 1960, when they sold the house to Fannie P. and Sidney S. Dobson (1890-1978 and 1881-1972, respectively) and moved to McCrorey Heights.
By 1971, Charlotte’s ongoing urban renewal campaign had devastated much of First Ward, destroying most of the early twentieth-century housing that had been home to Black Charlotteans for decades. Some residents sued. Eventual settlements required the city to save some buildings by relocating and rehabilitating them. The Wyche-Dobson-McCoy House was one of those houses. In 1979, after purchasing the house from Fannie Dobson, the city moved the house to a parcel at 801 East 8th Street, rehabilitated it, and sold it to Joyce Zimmerman McCoy and her husband James McCoy.